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Living and Learning 191

have been one day when we suddenly learned how to make fire, for
example. In some cases, interestingly, we are still evolving. Take our
appendix. Unless we have had it removed, it remains in our bodies
as a throwback to the days when we were grass eaters.
Adaptation in animals obviously happens unconsciously, as
in the example of the blue tits and robins on page 109. But, think
about the robins and blue tits as if they were people for a moment.
If you were a robin and able to reflect on what was happening to
you, you might have wanted to talk about why you no longer
seemed to be able to get to the cream on the top of milk bottles.
You might have begun to notice that the tops were being pecked
open and that there often seemed to be a small bird leaving a bot-
tle every time you approached it.
You might even have put all your territorial instincts aside for
a day and called all the robins in an area together to share what they
knew about the mystery of the bottle top.
In the early days of the internet when Microsoft was doubt-
ful about its likely impact, this is what Bill Gates famously did, call-
ing on all staff to reflect on the situation and, almost overnight,
changing the company’s view of the serious business opportunity
presented by the World Wide Web.
As Jayne-Anne Gadhia puts it: “The most important conse-
quence of learning is new behavior.”
Who would have predicted, for example, that we would come
to rely so much on computers and that our lifestyle would become
so sedentary?
The evolution of humans has taken many thousands of years.
Naturally, your own personal evolution has and will take place over
a much shorter timescale. You will probably already have experi-
enced key moments, similar in their impact on you to the discovery
of fire for humanity. Obvious examples of this would include the
birth of a child, the loss of a family member, going through a
divorce, or obtaining a new job.

Apart from our ability to use fire, what do you think the main steps have been in humanity’s
evolution?